The Pulse #120: What does Salesforce’s software engineering hiring freeze mean?
Also: how an hour-long GitHub outage is a reminder of the real cost of reliability, what Cloudflare’s recruiting statistics say about the job market, and more.
The Pulse is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Send me a message.
Today, we cover:
Industry pulse. TikTok’s US sell-or-shut-down deadline nears, CEO fired over disastrous Sonos software update, unusual use of AI in elite tennis, NVIDIA’s “personal” AI computer, Meta cuts DEI programs, rise and fall of vector databases, and more.
What does Salesforce’s software engineering hiring freeze mean? Amusing: between the two highest-paid corporate functions (sales and engineering) the one getting a hefty headcount increase is sales, which cannot show its productivity improved by GenAI tools.
GitHub outage: the real cost of reliability. Turns out, an hour-long outage per quarter is well within 99.9% reliability. GitHub offers this SLA for its customers as default, while GitLab Dedicated promises 99.5% (which allows for up to 10 hours/quarter in downtime.) It will cost you if you need more reliability.
What Cloudflare’s recruiting statistics say about the job market. There were about 6x more applicants for every open position at Clouflare in 2024, than in 2021. 2021-2024, Cloudflare has consistently hired about the same number of people.
How the commercial sector and academia regained computing lead. From the 1940s to the 1990s, software engineering breakthroughs were frequently coming from work done within governmental organizations. Since then, this has changed, with Big Tech, startups and academia taking a lead in pushing innovation ahead – at least for now.
1. Industry pulse
TikTok’s US sell-or-shut-down deadline nears
TikTok is one of the biggest social media platforms, with around 1.5 billion users globally and circa 121 million in the US, many of them younger in age. It’s owned and operated by Bytedance, which is based in China, and there are security concerns relating to this: India banned TikTok in 2020, while the US, Canada, EU and UK ban the app from government devices.
The US has taken a step in India’s direction: in April 2024, it passed a bill that requires TikTok be sold to a US company in order to bring it within US jurisdiction, or be banned from the US. The deadline for this is close: Sunday, 19 January. At the time of publication no sale had been announced, but despite the absence of a buyer so far, TikTok is an extremely attractive acquisition, with one in three US citizens using it. So far, speculation about potential buyers has focused on:
Elon Musk: the owner of X, a much smaller social network than TikTok. As one of the world’s richest people, and with his growing political influence in the US as part of the incoming Trump administration, Musk could be a serious bidder.
Other individuals could pull syndicates together to buy TikTok:
The most-subscribed YouTuber, Mr Beast
Former US Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin
A Shark Tank investor, Kevin O'Leary
Activision’s former CEO, Bobby Kotick
It’s curious that no large tech companies like Meta, Snap, Microsoft, and Google, have been mooted as potential buyers, and could be due to concerns about antitrust regulation.
A likely outcome is that TikTok sells to the highest bidder, whoever that is; although the video-sharing app might have a trick up its sleeve: spook US lawmakers into backing out of a ban.
The Information reports Tiktok plans to shut down the app on Sunday, in a move almost guaranteed to trigger a sizable reaction by its 100M+ US users. On the principle that politicians respond to pressure, the strategy seems to be to generate a noisy response by US voters that causes politicians to change course away from a ban, out of fear of being punished at the ballot box in future elections by disgruntled TikTok users who blame elected officials for the popular app being unavailable.
To be fair, TikTok has little to lose and a lot to gain: in the worst case, it sells to the highest bidder, and in the best case, it gets more time to operate in the US, and perhaps to increase the value of offers on the table for it.